TCP Book Recommendation

Look at the implementation of packet parsing in Etwork for an example. It's a pretty simple concept, but gets complicated by the fact that you may receive half of a header in one call to recv(), and then have to wait for the other half.

Thanks for the help!

Out of all the programming I've been studying over the years, network programming seems to be the most difficult to get a handle on and find examples to build off of.

In the FAQ is says that socket sets are the best thing to use for a Client/Server game model. What is the downfall of using a TCP buffer stream? Or is it that the game should poll for user input, process, and then send out the result back to the users?

I don't quite understand your question. Explain how you think that TCP buffer streams and socket sets solve the same problem?

The two solutions I thought that were possible:

1) Create a thread for each user that has a buffer of all packets receieve by that user. Remove a packet from the buffer and process in the game state.

2) Create a FD_set to contain all the users and poll the set for activity to proicess in the game state.


... or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about when coming to processing packets in a client/server model =(

-K

Ah, that's what you mean. We call that "a thread per socket" versus "single-threaded".

Thread-per-socket is easy to implement, and scales reasonably well to about 8 players. If you want "dozens" of players, it'll probably still work on a PC, although the overhead can be measured. If you want "hundreds" of players, thread-per-socket keels over and lies wimpering on the floor.

A single fd_set is more portable, and will work with hundreds, although you will start spending more time than you'd like in the kernel/network implementation.

any recommended reading for fd_sets besides the Etwork package? Ive been messing around with blocked sets, but I feel a basic understanding doesnt really lend itself to a very efficent server

The Forum FAQ has a lot of general socket reading pointers.